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Call It Booklyn

I think that people who ride the F train, which stops in the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and is therefore the train of choice for dozens of writers, editors and publishers, choose their subway reading material very carefully. You rarely see the folks who get off at Seventh Avenue reading anything pocket-sized, and never anything with an embossed cover, or anything that’s advertised on the train itself.

Here is my theory: I think people who ride the F train know who their fellow riders are, and save the trashy reading for home. On the F, they pull out only their hippest and most intellectual pursuits. Like the mythological “disco cars” of the 70’s, the last cars of certain trains that were supposedly reserved for using and selling drugs, the F is reserved for those who read books reviewed in The New Yorker.

You could say it’s a coincidence that the F train is filled with literary fiction fans. I say it’s a conspiracy.

Not, of course, that I would ever think twice about what I’m reading on the subway. I’m different. I didn’t move to Brooklyn for my publishing career, for the chance to mingle with other writers or for the prestige of a 718 area code. On Saturday, I won’t be attending the Brooklyn Book Festival at Borough Hall, Brooklyn’s answer to the late New York Is Book Country festival. And I wasn’t thrilled to learn that BookExpo America, the most important conference in the publishing year, will move some of its operations to Brooklyn in 2007.

It’s not that I’m above any of those things (I’m not), or that I wasn’t invited (although I wasn’t), it’s that I didn’t move to Brooklyn for the literary culture, because I didn’t move to Brooklyn at all. As I mentioned not long ago in my blog, I’m from Brooklyn, specifically, from Park Slope, the epicenter of Brooklyn’s literary culture, and possibly the very worst place in the country for a writer to have been born.

I live most of the year in the South now. But I come back to Brooklyn often, and when I do, I stay with my parents in Park Slope because I can’t afford to stay elsewhere. I love Mother and Dad, but I would prefer to stay anywhere else. Park Slope is a neighborhood almost exclusively populated by writers; to be specific, writers who are better than I am, are more well known than I am and sell more books than I do.

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Credit
Gary Hovland

I don’t want to give away the exact location, lest my crazed fans hunt me down, but let’s just say my family home is in the vicinity of Tea Lounge on Seventh Avenue, the cafe where, according to his Amazon page, Rick Moody (“The Black Veil”) likes to hang out and answer his e-mail. We’re closer to the old McSweeney’s Store (the one on Seventh Avenue that sold ferret wash and coat hooks shaped like bird claws in addition to books published by McSweeney’s) than to the new McSweeney’s Store (the one on Fifth Avenue that sells superhero supplies and houses the wonderful nonprofit 826NYC).

When I go home for the holidays, I would prefer to be someplace like Greenwich Village or the Upper West Side, where I can get books off my mind for at least a few minutes. But I am the only person in New York who can’t afford not to stay in Park Slope.

Not that the writing isn’t going well. I’m selling books, making film deals, moving copies in Germany. Anywhere else, that would make me quite a success and, needless to say, pay for an apartment. In Brooklyn I get pity (no National Book Award? No National Book Critics Circle? Not even nominated?), and when I come to town, I get a room in my parents’ basement.

There’s a rumor going around that Brooklyn is some kind of heaven on earth for writers. I think it started in The Believer, the magazine of optimistic writing founded by the same people who brought us the McSweeney’s ferret-wash store (and which, by the way, should stop bothering with individual contributors’ bios and just go with “the writers live in Brooklyn”).

I think they’ve been a little too optimistic: right now, somewhere, a young kid, M.F.A. in hand, is dreaming of living in the borough famous as a nice place to visit but a great place to live. A place where she’ll be next-door neighbors with an editor at Penguin, and the guy down the block will be an agent at Writers House. Books are plentiful and cheap in this magical borough, although what our young M.F.A. doesn’t know yet is that this is because they’ve been remaindered.

I’ll play poker with Jennifer Egan, our neophyte imagines. David Grand will drop by for coffee. I can write lyrics for One Ring Zero, the Brooklyn-based band with lyrics written by Brooklyn-based writers.I’ll get a desk at the Brooklyn Writers Space, read my work at the bars on Fifth Avenue, and if I need a job — on that one-in-a-million chance that my writing doesn’t make me rich — hey, there are about 50 bookstores on Seventh Avenue. That’d be a fun job!

SHE dreams, our young writer, of the day when she, too, can walk her blond Lab down Seventh Avenue on a Sunday afternoon, stopping at the organic bakery for a $7 loaf of whole grain winter wheat bread, and maybe give her new best friend Elissa Schappell (“Use Me”) a call to see how she’s coming along with the new issue of Tin House — the issue, of course, that’s publishing our writer’s own brilliant first works.

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Credit
Gary Hovland

If the hip-lit magazines One Story or Small Spiral Notebook haven’t already snapped up all her stories, that is. And when our hypothetical bright-eyed kid finishes her masterwork of a novel, she won’t even have to stray too far to find a publisher, not with the upstart presses Akashic Books and Soft Skull right in the neighborhood.

I have one piece of advice for you, aspiring Brooklynite: Run out, right now, and rent “The Squid and the Whale,” Noah Baumbach’s small masterpiece of a movie about growing up in Park Slope among writers. Observe closely Jeff Daniels’s character, the anti-Dave Eggers. He’s not rich, he’s not young, and his books aren’t selling. He ends up on the other side of Prospect Park, divorced, ignored by the critics, still convinced he’s smarter than everyone else and still looking for a parking spot. The character is said to be based on the filmmaker Baumbach’s own father, the writer Jonathan Baumbach.

Let me tell you the hard truth: Brooklyn is the worst place on earth for a writer. The competition is fierce and sometimes deadly. The “local authors” shelf in your bookstore has Kathryn Harrison and Paul Auster. Take your laptop to your local coffee shop to do a little work, and you’re likely to find Touré (“Soul City”) sitting at one end of the counter and Norman Mailer at the other.

Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss might be sharing the vegetarian special at a booth in the back, and don’t be surprised to find Colson Whitehead and Darin Strauss commiserating about book tours over coffee and pie.

THE phrase “anxiety of influence” takes on a whole new meaning when your influences are right there in the room with you, eating lunch.

Anywhere else in the country, people say, “Gee, you really published a book?” In Brooklyn, they ask when you’re going on Charlie Rose and if you know Jonathan Lethem. If not, end of conversation, time to move on. Getting off the F train right now is a young woman whose first novel was just pre-empted by Vintage for high six figures. The New York Times Magazine is writing her profile, Marion Ettlinger is taking her head shots, and she’s preapproved for a co-op on Prospect Park West.

You try writing a book under these circumstances.

On my most recent visit home, I dropped by a bookstore in Park Slope to sign copies of my latest book. Everywhere else in America, the author at her drop-by signing is greeted with warm handshakes and the offer of a beverage, sometimes even a snack. Much small talk is made. People ask you where you get your ideas and when you decided to be a writer, two questions that are unanswerable but, hey, at least you get to be the center of attention for a few minutes, sometimes as long as a quarter-hour if you really milk it.

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Gary Hovland

If you know any writer with a swollen head, I advise you to send her to a drop-by signing at a bookstore in Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, another writer is just a big yawn, and the bookstore is worried not about providing a snack or even a beverage but about whether it can return signed books.

On the positive side, in Brooklyn no one asks me where I get my ideas and when I decided to become a writer. I like to think that to the astute Sara Gran fan, the rich well of my inspiration is so obvious that there’s no need to ask. I choose not to consider the perhaps-more-likely possibility that they’re too busy wondering where Siri Hustvedt gets her ideas and, hey, when did she decide to be a writer?

Young writer, you learn to live with the pain to your ego. But there is a better reason not to move to Brooklyn: you will find nothing to write about that another writer hasn’t written about first. And if you move here, I will have even less to write about that another writer hasn’t written about first.

As a Brooklyn native, I am in a race against the clock. Most writers get to approach middle age knowing that as they get old and dull and run out of interesting things to write about, at least they can return for inspiration to the halcyon days of childhood. But everyone else has already written about my halcyon days, because everyone has already written about Brooklyn.

MY Brooklyn has been appropriated by those hipper than I, cooler than I — better writers than I, but that’s hardly the point. The point is: Brooklyn is mine, and I am not inclined to share it. You might say it’s a big place, and other writers have as much claim to it as I do. I say, unless you’re from Oxford, Miss., you really don’t understand.

Consider Seventh Avenue Donuts, formerly known as 24-Hour Donuts, a small doughnut shop and luncheonette in what used to be the south edge of, and now, according to any real estate agent worth his salt, is the dead center of, Park Slope. It’s also the least Park Slopish place in Park Slope. Everything is served with ketchup, the seats are made of plastic, smoking was allowed until the last possible minute, and you needn’t have won a MacArthur to be able to afford to eat there. I spent about 90 percent of my adolescence there.

In New Orleans awhile back, I went to see John Wray read from his fine novel “Canaan’s Tongue.” To promote the book, and presumably for fun, he re-enacted a journey that one of the characters in “Canaan’s Tongue” takes down the Mississippi in a raft. Mr. Wray was kind enough to share the fact that he named his raft Donuts, after a Certain Brooklyn Coffee Shop where he and some of his writer pals like to hang out.

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Credit
Gary Hovland

Thank you, Mr. Wray. I appreciate that. All that time spent cutting school and hanging out in Seventh Avenue Donuts in the 80’s is now wasted, because Mr. Smartypants decided it was his coffee shop, too, and has immortalized it as his own.

Another example: Like all good New Yorkers, I love the faded beauty of Coney Island, and over the years often thought, “Gee, wouldn’t this be a great place to set a mystery novel?” (All good New Yorkers, of course, not only love Nathan’s but also daydream about writing novels.) Apparently Maggie Estep (“Flamethrower’’) thought so too, which is why she sets much of her excellent Ruby Murphy mysteries here.

Well, forget about Coney Island, how about Williamsburg, where I lived in the 90’s? Paul Ford, author of the newish “Gary Benchley, Rock Star,” beat me to it. And pre-hipster Williamsburg? Well, it’s hard to top Henry Miller, isn’t it?

More or less all of the Greater Park Slope/Windsor Terrace area has been covered by Pete Hamill (“A Drinking Life”) and Bernard Malamud (“The Assistant”), so we can scrap most of my childhood right there.

Some other things I always wanted to write about: St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, that enigmatic downtown Brooklyn landmark (Jonathan Lethem beat me to that one in “Motherless Brooklyn”), the wonderful old Abraham & Straus on Fulton Street, where I went shopping for my new school clothes as a girl (Lethem in the “Disappointment Artist”), or the strange experience of living in pre-gentrification brownstone Brooklyn in the 70’s (Lethem in “Fortress of Solitude”).

As I say, I’m in a race against time here. A. & S. and Coney Island and Seventh Avenue Donuts may have already been claimed by better writers, but surely there is something of Brooklyn left for me, and me alone — if I hurry. I think there’s a block up by Garfield and Seventh — nope, that was in Paul Auster’s film “Smoke.” Down by the Gowanus Canal — oh, forget it, that whole neighborhood was done to death in “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” I grew up next to a family of Mohawk Indians who worked in high steel, that might be something — never mind. Joseph Mitchell.

Bay Ridge? Gilbert Sorrentino. Brooklyn Heights? Paula Fox. Frankly, between the new anthologies “Brooklyn Noir One” and “Brooklyn Noir Two” and the forthcoming “Brooklyn Hardboiled” (none of which I was asked to participate in, not that I’m bitter), I think they’ve got the whole borough covered. Almost.

You could say that only the dead, and Jonathan Lethem, know Brooklyn. I say, I’ve got a block in Vinegar Hill with my name on it, and I’m getting to work.

Sara Gran is the author of the novels “Dope,” “Come Closer” and “Saturn’s Return to New York.’’